Hey, Chelsea Handler Visited Us For Her New Netflix Show

Congratulations to Chelsea Handler, whose news-ish, documentary-ish Netflix show Chelsea Does… kicks off tomorrow with an episode in which she visits Silicon Valley. Well, more importantly, she visits WIRED, where writer David Pierce takes her through all manner of gadget-y innovation she has little patience for. “Why would you want to watch a movie that’s so out of focus?” she asks, wearing a Samsung Gear VR. We’re happy she came by, but we’re even happier to embarrass David, so please watch the show and then tweet at him and tell him that he’s dreamy.

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New GameOfThrones Teasers Set Up an Epic Family Feud

The slow morphine drip of glimpses at the new season of Game Of Thrones continues, as HBO released three new teasers today on Twitter. Each clip shows a house banner—Lannister, Targaryen, and Stark—with portentous voiceover accompaniment. In the Lannister version, it’s courtesy of the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), with the now-infamous Shame Nun ringing in the background. For House Targaryen, there’s fire everywhere as an ominous voice declares Daenerys “Khaleesi vosi,” or “Queen of Nothing.” And for House Stark, there’s a gorgeous lightning strike as Ramsay Bolton declares, “Winterfell is mine.” Game on.

Steam’s AtariVault Package Brings Back 100 Classic Games

Atari

Atari will release 100 of its classic games in a single package for Steam, called Atari Vault, this spring, it said today. So far, it promises to include Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Tempest, and Warlords in the package, with online multiplayer and Steam leaderboard support.

In addition, Atari’s press release promises “precision control” via the Steam Controller, which could be quite appealing if done correctly. Many classic Atari games like Centipede originally used a trackball controller, which few PC users today have access to. But the Steam Controller’s unique touch pads can mimic the feel of a trackball quite well, so they could be excellent for playing these classics.

Atari did not say which versions of the games (arcade? home? remakes?) would be included in Atari Vault, but it will show the game off at PAX South later this month in San Antonio.

Disney Postpones StarWars:EpisodeVIII To December 2017

Hey, Star Wars fans: Remember how you only had a year and a half to wait between The Force Awakens and Episode VIII? Well, not so fast. This morning, Walt Disney Studios announced that Episode VIII would be pushed from its original release date of May 26, 2017 to December 15 of that year. That puts it on the same weekend The Force Awakens dominated to end 2015, setting up another giant marketing push on that same schedule. But Disney isn’t pulling out of that May release date altogether—the studio will instead slot in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, pushing thatpicture upfrom July. If the date change makes you worry about the state of Episode VIII, don’t let it; principal photography on Rian Johnson’s as-yet untitled installment won’t begin until next month in London.

However, the change also sets up a colossal showdown between Episode VIII with James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar 2, which is currently set to open the following weekend. We’ll see who blinks first. For now, here’s the full press release from Walt Disney Studios:

This morning, The Walt Disney Studios announced new release dates for upcoming films from two of its major franchises.

Star Wars: Episode VIII, originally scheduled for release on May 26, 2017, will now debut on December 15, 2017. The move follows the extraordinary success of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which was the first Star Wars movie to premiere in December. In the popular holiday moviegoing corridor, it smashed numerous records, including biggest domestic and global debuts of all time as well as the biggest domestic second and third weekends, en route to becoming the highest grossing domestic release of all time with over $861M and the third biggest global release ever with $1.887B.

Written and directed by Rian Johnson, Star Wars: Episode VIII is currently in pre-production and will begin principal photography in London next month. Kathleen Kennedy and Ram Bergman will produce and J.J. Abrams, Tom Karnowski, and Jason McGatlin will executive produce. Stay tuned to StarWars.com for exciting updates in the coming weeks.

With Star Wars: Episode VIII jumping to December, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales will set sail on May 26, 2017, from its previously scheduled July 7, 2017, berth. The blockbuster franchise’s previous installment, the $1B-grossing Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, also debuted in late May.

In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Johnny Depp returns as Captain Jack Sparrow with Geoffrey Rush back on board as Barbossa, Orlando Bloom resurfacing as Will Turner, and a terrifying new adversary, Captain Salazar, played by Javier Bardem, in the mix. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, the film is currently in post-production.

2015’s Blockbuster Movies + Lego = One Amazing Supercut

This may be news to you, but people enjoy Lego versions of movies almost as much as they enjoy the movies themselves—and Andreas and Antonio Toscano have exploited that fact to great YouTube success. The brothers’ meticulous set reconstruction, coupled with some surprisingly fluid stop-motion animation work, has already led to stellar Legoized trailers for Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier; now, they collect their greatest hits (along with more than a few new bits) in a brickematic look at some of 2015’s biggest movies.

Starting with Rey and BB-8’s Jakku jaunt in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the supercut blazes through a total of 14 blockbusters. The usual suspects are in there (The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, Avengers: Age of Ultron)but so are some surprises: Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk,Terminator Gensisys, and even 50 Shades of Grey make an appearance. Not that stop-motion and sex can’t go together, as Team America: World Policeso bizarrely proved.

No word on when the next Toscano Brothers production is coming, but Deadpool is coming up fast, and there’s already plenty of trailer gold to pan for it. How many bricks to make a good chimichanga, you think?

Academy Responds to All-White Oscar Nominations

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its Oscar nominations last week, all the chosen actors had one thing in common: whiteness. They also gave fine performances, to be sure, but so did actors of color who were, for the second consecutive year, shut out of the most important awards pageant in Hollywood. The reaction by the public was swift. Hashtags trended.Actors decried the lack of representation. Commenters on web sites argued. Boycotts were called. And now the president of the Academy has responded.

In a statement released on Twitter last night, Cheryl Boone Isaacs pledged to do more to diversify the makeup of the voting Academy members. “In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity in our 2016 class and beyond,” she wrote.

She’s got a lot of work to do. According to a 2014 survey, 94 percent of the voting members of the Academy are white and 76 percent are male (full disclosure: this reporter’s father is a white, male, voting member of the Academy). Those numbers don’t even begin to represent the true demographics of America. The most recent U.S. census, taken the same year as the Oscar survey, estimates that the U.S. is approximately 77 percent white. The Oscars are merely a symptom of the larger problem infecting Hollywood. According to the 2015 Hollywood Diversity Report by UCLA, 94 percent of studio heads were white and a whopping 100 percent were male.

Voting membership in the Academy is limited to people working on theatrically-released films and who are sponsored by two current Academy members. So, though Isaac’s acknowledgement of the problem is an important step, to diversify its fanciest party first Hollywood must work to diversify itself.

Watch: Guillermo del Toro Interviews the Coen Brothers

When Joel and Ethan Coen’s 16th film, Inside Llewyn Davis, debuted in 2013 it followed the brothers’ biggest commercial hit ever, the remake of True Grit. But instead of lighting up the box office once again, Davis made a modest amount, garnered many awards nominations but few wins, and faded from the memories of all but the most devoted Coen fans. But more than halfway through the second decade of this century, Inside Llewyn Daviskeepspopping up on Best of the Decade Lists.

And justifiably so. Oscar Isaac, now a much bigger deal because of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Ex Machina, gave a breakout performance as the titular struggling, bitter folk singer. He conveys the frigid atmosphere of New York and the Midwest throughout the film, and combines bumbling dark humor with an acidic anger at the world for failing to drag him along in a riptide of success. It’s not an underdog story, but a mysterious Möbius strip of a movie that hits a sour note over and over but lingers in the mind. It rewards multiple viewings, and appreciation grows with time to analyze all that’s going on between Llewyn and the various people whose patience he wears thin.

Perhaps in anticipation of the Coens’ next film, Hail, Caesar!, which opens in February, the Criterion Collection is re-releasing Inside Llewyn Davis on Blu-ray tomorrow with a plethora of bonus features. There’s the filmed tribute concert featuring performances by Joan Baez, Marcus Mumford, Gillian Welch, and Jack White. There’s also, of course, plenty of commentary tracks. But most interestingly, there is a 40-minute conversation between the Coens and director Guillermo del Toro. Their wide-ranging conversation careens from the Coens early days to how they approach screenwriting now. Check out a clip from that conversation, in which del Toro and the Coens dig into the unique structure of the film and how that affected the directors’ typically straightforward writing process, above.

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